Despite more than 20,000 lawsuits filed against music fans in the years since they started finding free tunes online rather than buying CDs from record companies, the recording industry has utterly failed to halt the decline of the record album or the rise of digital music sharing.

Does Microsoft's "PlaysForSure" motto really mean it plays for sure? Does Apple's "FairPlay" play fair? Not exactly, says Linux-based media device vendor, Neuros, which is promoting an "Unlocked" media trademark in response to branded, proprietary digital rights management (DRM) schemes.

Warner Music has bent beneath the force of the anti-DRM winds sweeping the globe. The label will now offer its complete catalog, DRM-free, through Amazon's new MP3 store.

"The Open Document Foundation, which consisted of three individuals, disbanded," said Marino Marcich, managing director of the ODF Alliance. "The Foundation's proposals in OASIS did not receive sufficient votes -- quite common in any standards-setting body. Over the past few years, I have worked with the individuals involved. It's unfortunate that they chose to eventually disband the Foundation, but I wish them well."

What is it about Microsoft's proposed OOXML standard that has boffins hurling death threats at each other? Brett Winterford investigates.

Is the open-source community stealing ideas from commercial vendors? IP Innovations seems to think so; the patent-holding company recently filed a lawsuit for patent infringement against Linux distributors Red Hat and Novell, claiming that Linux uses ideas originally developed at the Xerox PARC laboratory.

In 2004 the European Commission found Microsoft guilty of monopoly abuse in the IT marketplace and demanded that complete interoperability information be made available to competitors. Microsoft objected to this decision and was overruled in September 2007 by the European Court of First Instance (CFI). The CFI found Microsoft guilty of deliberate obstruction of interoperability and upheld the obligation for Microsoft to share its protocol information.

" 'Microsoft should be required openly, fully and faithfully to implement free and open industry standards,' is the message of a letter by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. To help achieve this goal, FSFE offered its support for a possible antitrust investigation based on the complaint of Opera Software against Microsoft. The complaint was based on anti-competitive behaviour in the web browser market..."